One law for the rich?

The Statue of Justice wears a blindfold. This is to symbolize the impartiality of the law. It does not matter whether a person is male or female, black or white, rich or poor, Justice is blind to these differences. She delivers her judgments without bias. Criminal lawyer Clayton Ruby begs to differ.

In an article in the Globe and Mail in 1993, Mr. Ruby wrote that: "For the most part, our justice system is set up to catch poor people. It does not search for rich criminals. It does not focus on the kinds of offences they commit. Income-tax evasion, price fixing, consumer fraud -- there is rarely enough money in the budget to prosecute these crimes."

Poor people commit street-level crimes -- break and enter, mugging, prostitution, small-time swindles. Our police forces largely are set up to detect and prosecute this kind of crime. There are vastly more cops patrolling the streets than there are patrolling office towers.

And, once caught, there appears to be two justice systems.

Poor people can't afford to hire half a dozen of the best criminal lawyers, a small army of private investigators, and jury consultants to fight their cases. They have to settle for whatever legal aid gives them. And, the legal aid system is in serious trouble.

The idea behind legal aid is that everybody, regardless of financial status, should have access to competent legal representation. With funding from taxpayers and levies on lawyers, legal aid pays lawyers to represent, those who can't afford to hire one on their own. In Alberta, B.C., Ontario, and Quebec, the system hires the services of private lawyers.

In many of the smaller provinces, legal-aid work is handled by government-staff lawyers, sometimes known as public defenders.

Private lawyers receive about $67 an hour, or they would if the system wasn't broke. With a $300-million budget for 1995, the Ontario legal-aid plan has gone into debt by $70 million.

Many lawyers are not getting paid for work they've already done. Ontario Legal Aid owed Tamra Mann $60,000. Delays of up to six months in getting paid for work she'd completed left Ms. Mann with a severe financial crisis. It was so bad that she had to lay off her staff of four, and Hydro cut off electricity to her office because she couldn't pay her bill. Obviously, Ms. Mann's ability to give proper service to her clients is affected by her shortage of money.

In Ontario and elsewhere some lawyers have given up on legal aid. They say the plan is in such a mess they will no longer do legal-aid work. Some lawyers even dropped out of cases in progress, saying they doubted they would ever get paid for the work they were doing.

Earlier in 1995, lawyers in Quebec went on strike when the province tried to cut back on what legal aid would pay for. Part of the government's proposal was to withhold legal aid from clients who had been previously convicted of a similar offence (this provision has been used in Nova Scotia for years). In 1994, lawyers in British Columbia refused to handle legal-aid cases. They were protesting a plan to shift more responsibility into the hands of government-employed lawyers (Currently, private practice lawyers handle 85% of the province's legal-aid cases).

The larger provinces are now looking at moving more to a public defender system. It costs less and, because the state is both prosecutor and defender, it offers the chance of dealing with more cases through mediation rather than through the courts. The downside is that legal-aid clients don't get much of a choice in who represents them -- this gives rise to complaints that a two-tier system will develop. One for the rich who can afford to hire the top-level lawyers, and one for the poor who must take a number and wait for the next available lawyer.

The Chairman of the New Brunswick Law Society's legal-aid committee, Larry Veniot, doesn't like this approach. "If you're poor," he says, "you get the poor guy's lawyer. If he happens to have an interest in your case, fine. If he doesn't you're dealing with a 'bureaucrat at the motor-vehicle office.'"

Private-practice lawyers, such as Mr. Veniot, stand to lose a lot of their income if the provinces move to staff-run systems. Many private lawyers get 75% of their incomes from legal-aid work. In Ontario and B.C. alone, more than 800 lawyers earned more than $100,000 each from legal aid. Meanwhile, in Saskatchewan, salaried lawyers on the government payroll make about $70,000 a year as public defenders.

At the National Anti-Poverty Organization in Ottawa, executive director Lynne Toupin says: "There's a growing sense ... that we have a legal system that works for the rich but doesn't work for the poor."

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES:

1. Businesses now routinely hire private investigators to detect fraud among employees, customers, and suppliers. Middle class and wealthy homeowners pay private companies to monitor their property and protect it against theft. Paying for private security is not an option for the poor. Is it fair that wealthier Canadians should be able to buy better security than less wealthy ones? Discuss.

2. Writing in the Globe and Mail, Michael Valpy made the following points: "Canadians believe everyone should have equal access to health care. Yet they accept a justice system to which only the rich have comfortable access and the poor are grudgingly subsidized. Members of the middle class have to put up two arms, a leg and their first-born to get served." Discuss these comments.

RELATED ARTICLE: FACT FILE

More than one million Canadians use free legal aid services each year at a cost to taxpayers of more than $600 million.